It appears as though FC5 contains a bug which prevents none GPL modules (read nVidia) from being used.Has this been fixed in this one yet, or is it worth waiting a few more days for the fix to be rolled out?

"I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option."

You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence con

bug...not really a bug. Just a two keystroke mistake. It isn't a bug in any program or anything. My appologies for not being so up on fedora's policies...its a simple reconfiguration. One that I wish more distros would auto-compile into the kernel, but sadly many don't.

Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.

Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.

I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers

Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.

install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers [fedoraproject.org], you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.

Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers. They applied a patch that affected the functionality of tainted kernels - normal development practice would natrually require *that patch* be tested with a tainted kernel regardless. Throwing a patch over and saying it's OK because the automated testing didn't find a problem is like saying "it compiled - ship it".

So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).

Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.

Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.

Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.

If the Open Graphics Project [duskglow.com] ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.

If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).

I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.

Good question. No, the 9250 uses the RV280, not the R300. I've had some interest in the R300 project, but last time I looked at it, it was nowhere near as far along as the R200 code. The R200 drivers have been part of DRI for quite some time.And even the R200 drivers have problems. I can't use the accelerated framebuffer driver at the same time as xorg (I have to use the standard VESA one). I don't have texture compression support, despite the fact that my card supports it (this may be because S3 has t

In terms of performance, I can tell you that I can play Darwinia and NWN, though both have slowdown at places (and NWN unnecessarily limits any card that doesn't support texture compression to minimum-resolution textures). It's not a card that would be acceptable for someone seriously interested in playing modern games, however.

the name has to sound cool, uncool names are out. Like Gentoo and Slackware: pfft, gay! Ubuntu and SuSE, those just radiate coolness. Though I also agree with logos, if the packaged set includes stickers.

I don't like how it looks, but I'll probably get used to it. Having used FC3 and 4, the new 'f' logo looks pretty... weird. The theme is also a lot shinier than Bluecurve. Why are all desktop environments slowly tending to shiny?

It would be possible to triple the size of Fedora Core without even breaking into a sweat. And that's without even supporting multiple configurations of the same application (which they really should do) or rarer applications. If you want those, I reckon a 20 DVD pack would be necessary to be truly diverse.

I would re-work the layout of the CD-ROMS, though - you need too many for a minimal install - and I'd also re-work how to pick what is installed. At present, it is unnecessarily tedious to pick out what y

I new to Linux and am still running Fedora Core 3. Am I right in thinking that to upgrade to FC5 I have to basically backup anything I want to keep and reinstall everything? Is there no easier way of upgrading?

No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.

It depends. I feel a little better about upgrading my system because I keep all my important data -- photos, tax records, etc -- in its own separate ext3 partition that mounts to/home.

If you've done that very basic and important step, then you can upgrade -- or even install a new system from scratch -- without fear. (There may, however, be a few hours of tweaking involved, to install printers and the like.)

The same works for Windows, too, btw -- and can save you from losing all your data when XP destro

Err, I haven't used RedHat since FC3, but upgrading is normally accomplished by selecting the upgrade option when the installer finds an existing installation. That said, backups before major upgrades are *always* a good idea.

You should backup everything you want to keep everytime you do something major to your computer (such as upgrading your OS). Actually, you should backup your stuff on a regular basis anyways.

I'm not 100% sure about Fedora, but I know other distros support upgrading while keeping all your programs and settings, so I'm pretty sure Fedora does too. The backup is just a recommendation in case something goes wrong.

There are three things you can do:First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.

Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.

Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Do

I make a point of not upgrading to the last update until the next new version is out. I just upgraded from FC3 to FC4 about 2 weeks ago. I'm not completely unhappy with FC4 but among other things, certain icons have gone missing in Gnome, virtually all the panel apps went missing, Gdesklets broke, the weather panel applet doesn't have forecasts for my area anymore and the pop email applets went missing. That last one was a bugger, as I have about 5 different addys I need to keep an eye on. I ended up with M

Backup, install, and spend the next fortnight tweaking your system back into shape. There is no other way.;/
(I've got FC4, and I'm *not* upgrading)

Of course, if you've got all your documents etc. on a separate partition, you shouldn't run into really bad problems when installing FC5. Be sure to backup config files etc. that you may have put on the system partition.

I've built many linux machines over the years (with several different distros) and I've learned through experience that best practice is to keep system files and user data on separate volumes. Either create a dedicated partition for/home or use another physical drive entirely. I've had too many upgrades go bad and didn't have the time or patience to poke around to find the cause, so the quickest and best solution was to format and start over. Just my 2 cents.

Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.

Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.

Would this distro work for an old laptop - UMAX 233MHz 256MB 3GB? I have one lying around and was thinking about creating a wireless terminal to check email and possibly display pictures. A basic Core 4 installed fine but the UI wasnt very responsive sometimes. Thx for your help.

NetBSD may be a better choice for older hardware, as it consumes less resources than recent versions of Linux. Note that this is not an anit-Linux troll, much of that extra resource hungriness seems to come from the added functionality rather than superfluous bloat - and despite my personal preference for NetBSD, I'm considering putting FC5 onto my PowerBook, as there appears to be support for Java on PowerPC Linux.

You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.

I'd read that IBM have a port of the Sun JDK for PowerPC Linux. While GCJ and Classpath are progressing fast, I don't think they're quite ready for all the Swing and Tomcat/JSP based stuff that I'd like to do. The Swing classes at the very least are still a bit patchy. However, both projects have come on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, and along with the new Fortran 95 compiler I'm looking forward to the next few releases of GCC4.

I'd be interested in the answer to this as well. I tried Ubuntu on an older Dell Latitude running at 233mhz, and although it was well supported, it was pretty slow (although everything on it seems slow, I guess)

I'd recommend not using GNOME for it if you want to do everything easily. Probably the easiest thing to do is get Ubuntu and do a Xubuntu installation (this will give you an XFCE desktop; it's good looking and still not a resource hog). Basically, just pop in an install disc and choose to do a server installation, which after rebooting will give you a terminal. Login and then do:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktopsudo apt-get install gdm

This will give you a desktop and a login manager. The Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]

Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui.Regards,Steve

I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.

Although that does disable selinux earlier in the boot process, which, I guess, could be useful if somehow selinux was preventing you from booting.You'd add "selinux=0" to the kernel arguments by (E)diting the boot option and then (E)diting the line starting with "kernel". That'd disable it for the current boot. To permanently disable it, you can edit/boot/grub/grub.conf and add "selinux=0" to the list of arguments after "kernel".

I ran into this mostly because I wanted to try out reiserfs v3 (and reiserf

I think the idea is that SELinux is fine on a server that's doing more-or-less standard things. I know that it can interfere with hobbyist stuff, where you're significantly changing the system around. I also don't think that the end user is supposed to directly write SELinux policy rules, but to use high-level tools that control it (though I'm unaware of what tools exist to do this). SELinux is more of a toolkit for letting you build systems that provide secure environments than actually such a secure en

Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though.Regards,Steve

Fedora 5 comes with Kernel 2.6.15 with Red Hat patches. The latest official kernel is 2.6.16, which includes some important bugfixes. At the time of writing this, Fedora Core does NOT have 2.6.16 in the development tree, so it may be a few days before this upgrade is available.

Just as a personal note, I compile my own kernels, using the vanilla kernel patched with Andrew Morton's patches first, then with whatever of Red Hat's will still apply cleanly. Andrew Morton's -mm patches adds a lot of extremely useful functionality, for me, so that's my patchset of choice. (There are some nice real-time patches out there, too, but they're generally not compatible with other patchsets, making them a pain.)

If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.

Well, it can, but you need to re-compile the windows kernel with a special patch that Xen can't give you. Since you probably don't have the source to the Windows kernel, this is totally theoretical. This may change when CPUs have proper support for virtualisation (assuming you have a new CPU)

Well, I did actually run Windows Server 2003 using Xen 3.0.1. This was only 2 weeks ago. The only prerequisite is a Intel processor with the Vanderpool virtualization technology. Access to the screen is done via VNC.

You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.

Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player [vmware.com]. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).

To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle (a personal information search tool written in Mono). I currently use Beagle in Gentoo, and I have been quite impressed. It doesn't seem to suck up my processor like most document indexers (unless I pass the variable BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1), and it handles a lot of formats. I've tried getting Beagle to work in FC4, but always ran into issues (mainly had to do with mono). What I'm really hoping is now that Beagle is so e

I had a professor who loved Fedora and made his classes use it. In particular, he made us develop and deploy web apps onto a Fedora Core 4 system that each team built and wouldn't let anyone use Red Hat Enterprise, even though we had a department-wide site license that allowed that use. For most of the people there, it was their first experience with Linux and damn were people turned off to Linux by it.1) It was slow.2) It was a bitch to install... the installer kept freezing halfway through or dying on cer

FWIW, Red Hat has always liked to be on the Bleeding Edge of Linux, but in their own way. (e.g. If GNOME 2.x isn't ready to ship, make quick patches around the problems and ship it.) This tended to get them into a lot of trouble, because their OS would have all kinds of idiosynchrasies and inconsistencies that other distributions didn't exhibit.RedHat decided to address the matter with the Fedora branch. Fedora is a perpetual beta of RedHat's enterprise product. By releasing this beta, RedHat is able to get

This is a hobby OS. It is the developement tree for RHEL. What is so hard to figure out here? It is not a beginner distro, it is a testing ground for new ideas and functions. The entire point is to test things, and separated by name so that people like your professor cannot sue RedHat when something doesn't work as it should.

Point release version numbers don't really apply to something that is perpetually beta. There are dozens of Fedora based distros...ever notice that they all make changes/mods for better security/hardwaredetection/userinterface/etc..

I know this is a flame, and some fedora fanboys will mod be down for this and flame me, but please...do look around> this is a perpetual beta. If you want the 'good stuff' pay for it, or download something that has another couple of steps of tweaking built in.

While it's true that Fedora is a proving ground for new technologies, it's a mistake to say that it is in "perpetual beta". Rawhide, the development branch of Fedora, is in perpetual beta. Fedora Core is the stable branch of Rawhide. If it's not stable then something is wrong. So while on the one hand Fedora is not intended to be enterprise-grade and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the GP, on the other it does have its own test process and its own devel/stable release cycle.

Also, Fedora doesn't have point releases because point releases are old-fashioned. There's no need to wait for bug fixes to accumulate before making them available anymore because tools like Yum can be used to make them available immediately. New features are added every six months or so in a new major version, but it serves the same purpose as what used to be called a point release. The only difference is in the numbers.

So, that one was your one issue, my one issue was that when I tried to install it to my laptop external USB FC4 did not recognized it, nothing, zero, nada. For the installation my USB HD just did not existed.

I read in some forums that I needed to boot with some flags or something but I really did not wanted to bother so I installed Mandriva 2006 which recognized my external disk and installed without major problems.

The Fedora Download page, which is according to the announcement message supposed to redirect you to one of the mirrors, does not work - it redirects to ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com [redhat.com] which is (of course) busy. So let me allow to advertise my mirror - if you are in Europe, I have still about half a gigabit of bandwidth free at

MP3 encoding/decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because MP3 is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty and/or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship MP3 decoders/encoders or they might have included proprietary software. However, Fedora Core cannot and does not ship MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of shipping only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents.

The problem isn't distributing a codec, the problem is you can't legally have a GPL implementation in a jurisdiction where the patents on those formats applies (like the US). In the example of MP3, the patent holders grant free license for ditributing a decoding implementation, I believe. But that's not liberal enough to be compatible with the GPL, because the license could be revoked.

From the Fedora website:
"The ATI graphics drivers are proprietary and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora Core does not include proprietary software.
Fedora Suggests: Consider using a graphics adapter from Intel or any other manufacturer that supports open source with full specifications and/or source code. Note that ATI adapters will usually work well using the drivers included with Fedora, but accelerated functions (OpenGL) will not be available.

And it is people like us who will make sure that ATI and nVidia will never change their ways, why should they? People still keep buying their stuff even if they have to jump through hoops to install the drivers.Now, truth be told, I said "us" because I use the proprietary drivers as well and I am happy they exist but I also agree that ATI and nVidia must be pushed as hard as possible to open up more and Fedora/Redhat/Debian (and probably others) can't do that if they tell people "you shouldn't use those dri

Mp3 was excluded for one reason. Dogma. It has nothing to do with Fraunhofer being beligerent, because if it did, don't you think Ubuntu or others would have excluded mp3 support by now. No. It has to do with Red Hat, and now the Fedora Project, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, i.e. trying to get the world to move away from mp3, and towards FOSS alternatives.

I think if there's any "dogma" on display it's yours. Red Hat is a company incorporated in the USA and is legally liable for any infrin

This answer is valid to April 2010: No, and it won't. I think we can safely say at this point that ogg isn't taking over mainstream and that once it is freed, ogg will go back to a very very little niche. It'll simply take another four years.

For years I have used The Unofficial Fedora Faq located at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ [fedorafaq.org] to install all of the software missing from the Fedora Core downloads.

I agree with everything on that page, except for Java support. I develop Java and suggest that anybody who wants to develop serious Java applications use the official Java JDK from Sun. Otherwise, everything else is spot-on to help make Fedora a serious Linux desktop distribution.

Distributions don't change the license of the programs they contain. So if the kernel remains GPL2, then the kernel shipped with Fedora will also be GPL2. Basically all Linux distributions ship with programs using a whole bunch of different licenses. The parts of a distribution that are mostly distribution specific can use any license. I seem to remember that Yast, the Suse setup tool used to be closed source.

Fedora is a hat. You see the "Red Hat" logo? The type of hat the guy is wearing in the logo is called a Fedora [wikipedia.org]. Given that the hat is named after a Frech play, I don't think that anyone is really worried about what it means in Portugese.

I'll look it up later, if I remember, and post what I find--I've got a couple of good dictionaries. I don't recall the word, personally. Of course, you probably have access to a better dictionary than I do.